Rape was a way to get payment, a way of rewarding ourselves

For the first time, former Congolese militia boys tell how they raped without regret, writes Jonathan Pearlman. With a hint of a boastful smile and no sign of shame Remy Bienda admits to the age of his youngest victim.

Remy Bienda ... "We didn't think about the women."

It is a Sunday morning and we are sitting on tins and sacks on the small dirt floor of the hut in a camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). The hut is igloo-shaped, made from tattered cardboard and plastic sheets embossed with fading logos of the United Nations.

Esperance lives with a woman, a sort of guardian, and the woman's two daughters, 12 and 14. In the smaller section, a bedroom that also serves as a kitchen, is a heap of matting and cardboard the bed which they all share. This will also soon be home to the baby Esperance did not plan.

When her mother died of natural causes, Esperance's father abandoned her. Now, two days short of her 16th birthday and six weeks from her expected delivery date, she recalls the events of late last year. "I was out collecting firewood with some friends. Three soldiers approached and started to run after us. I fell in a ditch and they grabbed me and took me to their barracks. They didn't let me out. They kept me in a tent and raped me for three days."

Esperance's presence surprised no one. In these parts, rape surprises no one. She was fed and looked after by soldiers' wives. Some were kind, some treated her with contempt. When malaria struck, one wife persuaded the kidnappers to release her, or be troubled disposing of a corpse.

Back at her refugee camp, she was wracked with a pain not unfamiliar. All this had happened to Esperance previously. "When I was 14, [rebel soldiers] took me to the hills and raped me for two days."

Pregnant as a result of her second enslavement, Esperance was urged by friends to have an abortion.

"But I realised that this child is not the one who did these things. I thought that I will look after him and love him. Sometimes bad circumstances can be a blessing. Maybe one day this child will even be able to help me in my life."

Through a World Vision interpreter, she says all this without tears. As we leave, her curiosity is caught by teenagers heading to a rocky patch of level ground at the camp entrance, and, with a lumpy ball and rickety posts, commence their weekly football game. Each refugee camp has teams.

"I was a midfielder for Buhimbo's [the camp's] women's team," Esperance says. "Six months after I have the baby, I will start playing again. I've seen others do it. I love playing football. When I play, I stop thinking about my problems."

Overwhelmed by trauma, some other women we meet in Democratic Republic of Congo seem detached from the remnants of their previous lives. But the football field attaches Esperance to a point in her past. With her temporary dwelling in crowded squalor the UN bans permanent buildings because it discourages long stays Esperance is not typical of this country, even though a million refugees live mostly within a short journey of home villages.

Despite decades of war, most Congolese live in cities and rural villages. All, however, are tainted by a common stain. In every village, camp, road and almost every home, a plague is stealing and destroying women. War, chaos and carnage have so warped society that rape is everywhere. Attacks are vicious and unrelenting.

At a women's clinic run by Medecins Sans Frontieres in the remote hillside village of Nyanzale, just north of Goma, the head nurse, Chantal Kaghoma, allowed us to observe three consecutive consultations. All three women had arrived that morning.

The first was 20 and pregnant with her husband's child. She had been raped, repeatedly and violently, by two soldiers three days earlier. She feared losing her baby.

The second woman, 28, was raped by two soldiers the previous day. Her husband said he would not divorce her as long as she was tested for sexually transmitted diseases.

The third woman, 20, was raped by a soldier two days earlier, and more than a year earlier. Her mother told her to seek counselling and medical tests. These were the 225th, 226th and 227th sexual violence cases seen by the hospital in three weeks. Ten a day, up from eight a day last year.

Kaghoma has supervised the sexual violence program at Nyanzale since October 2006 and says rape numbers fluctuate according to which troops control the area.

"The big difference between now and when I first arrived is that sexual violence has become banal. It is so common. It happens to everyone."

Early in the rape epidemic, in the late 1990s, most husbands divorced raped wives. Now rape is so prevalent, husbands tend to stay with wives, provided they are tested for STDs. Perhaps it is dissipation of stigma; perhaps the evaporation of spousal choice. The most likely explanation, however, is kinship. Around Nyanzale, for instance, the controlling militia is from the same ethnic and linguistic group as the villagers. Husbands, Kaghoma explains, can more easily live with a wife who has been raped by one of their own.

But stigma is retreating, says Kaghoma. "Almost everyone in the village has been raped. The women find it almost normal. The husbands say that if their wives get tested, it is OK. Women do not have time to deal with it psychologically. They do not get blamed by their husbands. Around here, the rape is accepted."

Many women want to tell their stories. Some want the world to know their plight; many are motivated by the absence of justice and retribution. Aid groups estimate a third of women have been raped.

Many women we met spoke positively of future plans; others were too scarred and brutalised.

On a hot afternoon in the provincial capital of Goma, Zamunda Sikujuwa, 53, barely makes a living selling palm oil, maize flour and dried fish, bought from the market and packaged for resale. Home is a dark cement room in a transit shelter run by Heal Africa.

A big grandmotherly woman with a round face, Sikujuwa's frequent broad smile is a source of joy until the observer notices something awry with it; too willing, overripe. Rocking back and forth on her chair, her smile vanishes and her eyes swamp with tears that do not stop until her story is told.

Fleeing Goma fighting six years ago, she and her family sought refuge at Kindu, where family welcomed them until it was realised the Sikujuwas were without food or money.

"Local militia came to the house and asked us for money. We said we had none. Five days later, at four in the morning, seven soldiers came. They took my husband into the room where my children were and killed him. Then they killed my children. They came back to the room and raped me. Then with the gun they entered me. Then they left me alone. People from across the road took me to the local hospital. I did not know where I was. A priest was there and he saw blood running out of me. They put me on a plane to Bukavu. When we arrived, they did surgery at the airport."

Sikujuwa says she often regrets surviving. She has no pictures of her husband or two children. She cannot walk properly because soldiers twisted her legs. Her sleep is sporadic. "I will stay and die here," she says. "I don't have anywhere to go. No one cares for me."

Sikujuwa finishes her story, wipes away her tears and goes back to her stall, selling palm oil to a child. They know each other and exchange greetings as she funnels oil into a small plastic bag. She is smiling again.